Mailsum: Stats From Your Mail Accounts

We’re definitely not short on ways of communicating with people on our computers. Everyday, tons of new social networks and other types of services come out, trying to catch our attention, and sometimes even becoming part of our workflow. But no matter how many of these new services you use, your email is likely still the epicenter of everything you do on the Internet.

Especially around a work setting, using email is a primordial part of everything you do. So, what if you could have an app that gives you the right information on what you are doing with your email, so that you can then focus your productivity around what really needs it? We’re talking about an app called Mailsum. Read on to see what it can do.

Mailsum

Mailsum

You can think of Mailsum as an extension for Mail.app that works on its own. It works by gathering information from your accounts on the app and so that it can then display it to you in a very cool way, with tons of stats, graphs and other great stuff that we’ll get to later.

Mailsum has only recently been released and right now it’s going for $4.99. Currently, Mailsum only works with Mac OS’s default email client Mail.app, so if you are a Postbox or Firebird user, this isn’t going to be of any use to you.

Statistics

Stats

The most important part about Mailsum is of course, the information that it can display to you about how you work with your email accounts. The app can neatly show you certain stats for custom timeslots (today, yesterday, this week, this month, etc.), which are the following:

Email Received (Divided into three categories: General, “To” and “CC”)

Email Sent

Time of the day when most email is received

Time of the day when most email is received

Average Response and Writing time

Number of “Flagged” Email

Number of Contacts

Each stat will be shown with a small comparison depending on the period of time that you’re viewing. For example, if you’re viewing stats for the current day, below each stat for the day you can see it compared to yesterday. Also, if you hover over each box of stats, you’ll be able to see the information relating to the week, month and total history of the corresponding stat.

Top 5 and Graphs

Top 5

Besides the statistics, you can also find a few more tabs like the “Top 5” and the “Graphs”. The first one of them is exactly what it sounds like, it tells you the top five people who you email the most and who you receive the most email from, along with the total number of emails received and the average response times of them.

Graphs

The Stats are also quite useful in finding out the behavior of your email usage. Under the graphs tab you can find a few filters and a main area where the graph is displayed. You can change these to compare your usage between different time ranges and accounts, as well as change them from graphs to pie charts.

Social

Mailsum.com

One of the main features that the developer publicizes about Mailsum is the inclusion of a “social” feature where you can use your accounts on various social networking services to broadcast your email usage to your friends and followers. And if you have friends who also use the service, you can add them with their email and compare results between your data.

To use this feature you need to register an account on the app’s site. This not only gives you access to the sharing features, but it will also provide you with a way of viewing at your stats inside the website, where your information will always be available. Also in their website you can compare your usage with users from certain countries, and gender or age-specific users.

The Mailsum web service can also provide you with a “Business Plan”, for monitoring the email usage of your employees or co-workers. You can see their paid plans here.

Worth It?

Without a doubt, Mailsum is the easiest and most comfortable way of viewing stats from your mail usage in a quick and useful way. But the real question is, do you really need it at $5 bucks? It depends. For most people (including me), email is slowly being replaced by other platforms and social networking services that fulfill productivity needs in a work setting. Sure, we all still use email (and will continue to do so for a long time), but do you really need an app to tell you how productive you are in your mail accounts?

Mailsum even tries to get creative around their market, with features like their online sharing, but I can hardly see anyone competing over “who has the most productive email usage” with their friends. Although the feature might have a few more creative uses, like monitoring how employees are using their email in a small office or anything similar. I guess it depends, like on most cases, on your needs and your workflow.

Overall, it’s a great app though and definitely delivers on its promise. If you’re an email enthusiast, you should definitely check it out.

Mailsum
Reviewed by Jorge Rodriguez on
Jun 5.
Mailsum is an app that works with Mail.app to show you stats and graphs from each of your accounts, as well as see them online, share them and compare them with your friends.
Rating:
9 out of
10

Good idea, and we’re actually looking into this “addon / feature” for the App.

Keep an eye on us ;=)

Cheers,
Bas / Mailsum Support

Albert Kinng

June 5th

Well, I love Postbox app, it is a great well designed app for emailing. All my communications are based on email even the corporate ones. I can’t see your point because of that. Facebook and tweeter are not the base or most important networking communications inside professional grounds. If you are saying that the mayority of YOUNG PEOPLE don’t even use email then I can give you credit for it. But I certainly doubt that my Corporate GM prefered facebook or tweeter on top of emails. Think twice before posting next time.